The teasmade is making a comeback

It's oh-so-naff (even John Major had one) but, whisper it quietly, the Teasmade is making a comeback

A gentle sound softens the blast from even the most raucous alarm clock in thousands of bedrooms.

A low, distant humming which is not usually enough to wake you, but is oddly comforting if it does.

Gradually, it becomes louder and more insistent before erupting into a brief hissing, fizzing, whooshing roar.

Then silence, perfect silence, returns to the bedroom.

Birdsong reasserts itself outside (if you're lucky). You wake up slowly and softly, thinking to yourself how pleasant it would be to drink a cup of tea, just as soon as you have the energy to raise yourself onto an elbow and pour it out.

And then you smugly congratulate yourself on having filled your Teasmade kettle the night before.

The Teasmade has been an object of social derision for many years.

Its death-knell was sounded by Norma Major, who unwisely disclosed when she was living in No. 10 that it was a piece of apparatus that graced the Prime Ministerial bedroom.

This unleashed a torrent of snobbish ridicule similar to that engendered by the wicked suggestion that John Major tucked his shirt into his underpants.

There was something that came across as very Pooterish about what we knew of the Major household, and the Teasmade fitted the image perfectly.

So lower middle class! So petty bourgeois! And oh, so 1950s!

I should have sprung to their defence at the time and can remember feeling guilty that I didn't. What, after all, is so wrong with a Teasmade?

Well, yes, the name is somewhat twee, and, of course, the possession of a Teasmade acknowledges

that - along with 99 per cent of the population -one doesn't keep domestic staff.

But for those of us who are unable to function

in the morning without a cup of tea, it is one of the most important pieces of electrical equipment in the house.

And if I needed any further endorsement of this view it has been provided by the John Lewis department store group, which has announced that it plans to reintroduce the machine and is seeking an electronics company to manufacture a contemporary model.

The company's electrical buyer acknowledges that it has at least 12 complaints a day in busy sales periods about the lack of availability.

So does John Lewis have its finger on the pulse of the nation? Yes. It is a successful company because it sells the British people things they want to buy.

And that includes the Teasmade.

I admit that, compared with others, I am a fairly recent convert. When my husband died ten years ago, my mother bought me a Teasmade in an act of sympathy.

"You'll be needing this," she said lovingly.

I come from a family which drinks tea before it gets out of bed and, interestingly, that tea is always made by the man of the house.

Throughout my childhood, we children were woken by our father as he placed a cup of tea by our bedside.

None of us has ever taken sugar, because he refused absolutely to carry it upstairs. My brother always made the tea in his house.

My mother, who is now 93, spoke movingly the other day about how her father used to

bring her tea in bed, even when she had grown up and lived with him during World War II, as a married woman whose husband was away at sea.

Women need to drink tea in bed because the moment they are up and dressed they are on the case.

Any mother of schoolchildren will tell you that it is impossible to raise a cup to your lips when you are simultaneously making sandwiches, finding socks, looking for the gym shoes/football shorts, filling in the school trip permission slip, writing cheques and trying to discover exactly where the after-school football match is being held.

But life has been very difficult for people like me these past few years because the Teasmade, having been made by a number of different companies across its history, has been out of production since 2000.

It has been possible to buy it on the internet

- the word "Teasmade" produces 19,800 entries on Google - but most of the interest is in the historic models of the early years.

The original "teawaker" was invented by Samuel Rowbottom in 1891, and was subsequently patented as the Automatic Tea Making Apparatus (I bet he didn't call it ATMA).

It used gas and sounds incredibly dangerous, although it worked on the same principles as today's electric machines.

His invention was further developed in 1930 by the delightfully named Ron Grumble, who produced a machine called the "Early Morning Waiter", using both gas and electricity. One can only hope that Mrs Grumble was a happy woman.

The breakthrough came two years later, however, when George Absolom developed a

"Teesmade" (sic), which immediately became the must-have item of the day.

It was included on every wedding present list, and was further popularised when the Goblin company took it over and produced the Teasmade in 1936.

The last company to produce the model, Swan, was sold in 1988 to a French company which went bankrupt in 2001 - about the time I broke my Teasmade's teapot lid.

The vagaries of international commercial acquisitions have been as nothing to the search for spare parts among those of us with broken, incomplete, Teasmades.

I have resorted to combing the local charity shops as well as bric-a-brac stalls at the school fairs in order to cannibalise those Teasmades that do occasionally appear; because everyone's Granny has got one somewhere.

Right now, I have a teapot that does not exactly fit into the machine, but cheerfully performs its morning miracle when wedged in at the base with a tube of face cream.

"Don't you end up with sour milk and old teabags in the bedroom?!" asked someone, with a note of fastidious distaste.

Well, you can put your milk in a flask, but I'm not in bed long enough for the milk to go off while I sleep, and the old teabags go down the loo.

And, yes, you do have to fill the machine when you go to bed. But how much better is that than going downstairs at dawn?

So hooray for this great iconic British invention which lets the nation's mothers draw breath before they have to get to grips with the day.

Let the bells ring out - the tea-making process alone does it for me - in defence of a gadget that does exactly what it says and does it very well indeed.

The idea that we will once again be able to go to a local department store and splash out on a new Teasmade means we can all sleep a bit more easily at night.